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Princeton students buoyed by close vote in Israel divestment referendum

A student referendum calling on Princeton University to divest from firms profiting from the Israeli occupation in Palestine has been defeated by a very narrow margin.

But campaigners are seeing the result as a major achievement as 965 undergraduates (47.5 percent) voted for the measure compared to 1,067 (52.5 percent) against.

“Though divestment did not pass this time around, we encourage you to take heart, for we won in many other ways,” the campaign coalition Princeton Divests said on its website on Friday.

Graduate students are set to vote in a similar referendum on 29 April.

“Divestment has always been an uphill battle, and we knew from the outset that failure (in the strictly electoral sense) this time around was likely,” the group adds. “From the very beginning, we saw this campaign as one step of many in laying the groundwork for change.”

“One of our main goals was to educate and engage a wide variety of students on the injustice, suffering and human rights violations of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,” Princeton Divests said, “as well as on our university’s ongoing contribution to this systematic oppression through investments.”

History of struggle

Princeton has a long history of resisting divestment and eventually succumbing to such demands. The first campus protests calling for divestment from companies complicit in South African apartheid were held in 1959. But it took more than twenty years for the university to finally act.

Comments

Next time for sure. I believe the good guys win in the end even if the end is sometimes a long time coming. Israel is losing position fast in the Palestinian issue. The world has lost patience with Israel's cruelty and criminality.